31

A month after Vegas, Mom turned yellow. Her husband didn’t notice. Charlene—the neighbor with the chickens—did. I found out when I checked my answering machine. My car keys still jangled in my palm while I listened to her nasal, small-town twang, chattering about a Thai soup recipe, the peppers she bought at the Farmer’s Market, and the co-worker she hated. Then—

“You won’t believe this. Charlene says I’m ba-na-na yellow. Anyways, we’re driving to UCSF Medical Center for–”

My answering machine cut her off. My keys dropped to the floor.

I called back, but she didn’t pick up. It was late so I climbed in my car and sped off to work. In the office kitchen, I watched the coffee pot gurgle, ignoring the ringing phone. I smeared pink lipstick on my lips and pictured my mom’s angry liver attacking her golden skin.

Had her drinking escalated? Was it cirrhosis? Would her liver have to be removed? Could I give her mine? I checked the mirror for hidden pockets of yellow pallor. I’m my mom’s daughter, after all. My skin was hers.

I walked back to my desk, and my manager was waiting for me.

“Can you come in here?” she asked.

I walked through the dark hallway to her cramped office. Billing issue, I figured.

“Close the door.” She lifted her Bugs Bunny mug to her mouth, realized it was empty, and set it back down on her desk. Jan’s hair was thinning prematurely, causing paralegals to snicker “Here comes the bald eagle” whenever she approached. She was wearing her favorite faded black jeans, which meant it was casual Friday. I glanced at my wrinkled skirt and T-shirt, realizing that I forgot to cover my tattoos and forgot all about casual Friday. She nibbled at a cheese Danish and wiped her mouth.

“I just made fresh coffee,” my voice was higher than I expected. Her head wobbled slightly towards the photo she kept on her desk of her husband, a hiker with a beard. He looked ten years younger than Jan.

“So,” she said, looking straight at the computer in front of her, “We’re letting you go.” She shuffled papers on her desk, then opened and closed a drawer. A new shame warmed my neck. Tori Amos must’ve complained when I forgot to cancel her meeting with her lawyer. She’d politely flipped through a magazine for a half hour before I noticed my mistake.

Jan swiveled in her chair and sneezed spraying the papers she’d set down in front of me with her spit. It was my employment contract. Panic made me queasy.

“It’s at will.” Jan sniffled, but it came out like a snort.

“Is it because I’m late?” I asked.

“Your general performance,” she said. Had she read my story on the computer at my desk about my job with the couple? “We need you to clear out your desk and go.” It sounded like a question, but it wasn’t.

This was my first real office job. I’d never been officially fired by a management-type person. Strippers don’t get fired; we wander off until we come back hungry, full of mangy need. I sent an email to my co-workers, saying goodbye, and slithered out of the office. Then, I hauled ass to the UC San Francisco Medical Center to see about my mom’s liver.

I drove the 382 miles on the 5 North, listening to PJ Harvey and pushing ninety most of the way. There’s been a mistake. My mom was healthier than the horses that had knocked out her teeth when she was eighteen. She told us she had gotten stitches on her bruised and yellow lips, which meant the blood was already rushing to the damaged cells to restore them. Yellow meant healing, right? Yellow was good.

When I arrived at the hospital, she grinned at me and put down her Woman’s Day magazine. Her face and arms were the color of spaghetti squash, puffy and bloated. She’d ripped recipes and scattered them on her lap like confetti.

“Do the doctors know what’s wrong?” I asked her.

My step-dad grumbled, “Too much whiskey in her belly.” Disgust was leaking out of him.

“That’s not it. See? I’m not shaking.” She held her steady hands in the air as proof. She was no alcoholic. Sure, she drank. By age seven, I was making her tea: Lipton with one small teaspoon of white sugar. A splash of low fat milk. By eleven, I made her Jack and Coke. Three ice cubes. She guzzled so many liquids her liver could swim laps in her abdomen. These San Francisco doctors underestimated my mom, a tough one who could always get back in the saddle.

“Let’s get out of here. I’m starving,” she said.

“Me too.” My step-dad left us to go find food alone. Mom casually pulled on some pants and a brown jacket with two shell buttons. Her legs were more spindly and puckered than I remembered. And she was jaundiced. We walked out an emergency exit down some stairs, like a team.

On Fillmore Street, the sun was bright and the wind was chilly. We strolled into a bookstore. My mom, a speed-reader who typed sixty words per minute, grabbed The Easter Parade. We sat on a bench inside a bagel shop with a big window and watched shoppers stroll up and down Fillmore as the fog wrapped around the tops of Victorians like foam. We sipped tomato soup from paper bowls. Our elbows touched.

“It’s not as good as mine,” she said.

“No, of course not.”

“Too salty. And it needs some of my delicious basil.” Her greenhouse exploded with orange and red heirlooms year round. I loved to get tangled in their wiry vines, dust off the ripe ones on my T-shirt, and pop them in my mouth. I would fill my arms and shirt with the rest to slice and drizzle with her signature vinaigrette. She grew zucchini big as baseball bats and green apples cluttered her lawn. The ones she didn’t bake in crisps and cobblers were fed to her horses. Neighbors came with empty arms and left with Ziploc bags full of Mom’s fruit.

I told her about the migration habits of cicadas, how they molted their old skin, became new again. She looked at me, puzzled.

“I got fired from the law firm,” I said.

“It’s okay, honey. You’ll get another job.”

“I’m stripping again,” I said, even though it wasn’t exactly true yet. I knew it soon would be. She stroked my back, like I was a cat.

We walked through the thick fog back to the hospital, where she got undressed and climbed back into bed. A nurse folded her arms in front on her chest.

“This isn’t a hotel,” she said sternly. Mom chuckled. “I’m fine. Go back home.” I hugged her close, shuffled out the exit and stepped into the moist San Francisco night.

On the drive back to L.A., tension pressed down on my ribcage. She’s fine.

I went jogging like the runners I’d envied every morning on my commute. I had to breathe when I jogged. I couldn’t cry and run at the same time. I refused music and shunned podcasts. Silence allowed me to count: three minutes of warm up at a pace of 3.9. I was aware of every muscle in my back. My knee clicked. Give up later. Five minutes in, I forced my legs to speed up to a pace of 5.7. I trotted. Eighteen minutes in, drop your shoulders, relax your neck. Forty minutes later, weightless and calm; I could run for hours. Worry poured out of me like radio waves. Pools of sunlight glittered on the surface of the reservoir. Three minutes of cool down.

When the phone rang, I raced to get it.

“It’s not my liver,” Mom said.

“Oh?” I laughed.

“I have a cancer so rare, it’s like getting struck by lightning,” she said. “It’s pretty early stage. An-eee-ways, they’re doing Whipple surgery.”

“Should I come?”

“In a couple weeks, when I’m home.” She was logical, reasonable, and organized. She didn’t want to inconvenience me.

I asked, “What kind of cancer?” But she’d already hung up.

Whipple sounded like pie topping, but, according to Ask.com, it was a surgery performed for patients with bile duct cancer. It involved cutting open Mom’s stomach, removing her intestines, spreading them out on the table like a ribbon, scraping the cancer off and stuffing them back inside. After Whipple surgery, eating solid food would be a novelty. Chances of heart or liver failure were high. She’ll be fine, I thought, defiantly, but I held my belly tightly as the tension weighed down on my body.

Her chemo and radiation treatments started. Her phone messages stopped. She mailed me recipes she’d found in magazines with handwritten notes in her perfect, paralegal script: “Great and Easy!” I cooked only her yellow dishes. I perfected lemon bars with shortbread crust and labored over whipped egg whites for banana soufflé. I peeled off her Post-it notes and tacked them onto my kitchen cupboards for inspiration while I sifted flour and squeezed juice from lemons. My floor was sticky with powdered sugar. I crammed my kitchen counters with trays of her dessert then watched it all spoil.